The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [1]
Out of North Africa
Variations on a Theme
The Mother of All Ice Cream
Hauts Bistros
PART FIVE Proof of the Pudding
The Smith Family Fruitcake
Fries
Fish Without Fire
Back of the Box
Repairman
Big Bird
Pies from Paradise
Permissions Acknowledgments
Introduction:
The Man Who Ate Everything
“My first impulse was to fall upon the cook,” wrote Edmondo de Amicis, a nineteenth-century traveler to Morocco. “In an instant I understood perfectly how a race who ate such food must necessarily believe in another God and hold essentially different views of human life from our own.… There was a suggestion of soap, wax, pomatum, of unguents, dyes, cosmetics; of everything, in short, most unsuited to enter a human mouth.”
This is precisely how I felt about a whole range of foods, particularly desserts in Indian restaurants, until 1989, the year that I, then a lawyer, was appointed food critic of Vogue magazine. As I considered the awesome responsibilities of my new post, I grew morose. For I, like everybody I knew, suffered from a set of powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime. I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness. At the time I was friendly with a respected and powerful editor of cookbooks who grew so nauseated by the flavor of cilantro that she brought a pair of tweezers to Mexican and Indian restaurants and pinched out every last scrap of it before she would take a bite. Imagine the dozens of potential Julia Childs and M. F. K. Fishers whose books she peevishly rejected, whose careers she snuffed in their infancy! I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.
Suddenly, intense food preferences, whether phobias or cravings, struck me as the most serious of all personal limitations. That very day I sketched out a Six-Step Program to liberate my palate and my soul. No smells or tastes are innately repulsive, I assured myself, and what’s learned can be forgot.
STEP ONE was to compose an annotated list.
My Food Phobias
1. Foods I wouldn’t touch even if I were starving on a desert island:
None, except maybe insects. Many cultures find insects highly nutritious and love their crunchy texture. The pre-Hispanic Aztecs roasted worms in a variety of ways and made pressed caviar from mosquito eggs. This proves that no innate human programming keeps me from eating them, too. Objectively, I must look as foolish as those Kalahari Bushmen who face famine every few years because they refuse to eat three-quarters of the 223 animal species around them. I will deal with this phobia when I have polished off the easy ones.
2. Foods I wouldn’t touch even if I were starving on a desert island until absolutely everything else runs out:
Kimchi, the national pickle of Korea. Cabbage, ginger, garlic, and red peppers—I love them all, but not when they are fermented together for many months to become kimchi. Nearly forty-one million South Koreans eat kimchi three times a day. They say “kimchi” instead of “cheese” when someone is taking their picture. I say, “Hold the kimchi.”
Anything featuring dill. What could be more benign than dill?
Swordfish. This is a favorite among the feed-to-succeed set, who like it grilled to the consistency of running shoes and believe it is good for them. A friend of mine eats swordfish five times a week and denies that he has any food phobias. Who’s kidding whom? Returning obsessively to a few foods is the same as being phobic toward all the rest. This may explain the Comfort Food Craze. But the goal of the arts, culinary or otherwise, is not to increase our comfort. That is the goal of an easy chair.
During my own praline period, which lasted for three years, I would order any dessert on the menu containing caramelized hazelnuts and ignore the rest. I grew so obsessive that I almost missed out on the crème brûlée craze then sweeping the country. After my praline period had ebbed, I slid into a crème brûlée fixation, from which I forcibly wrenched